General

Google faces issues with UK Streetview

I had to laugh at this when i was reading BBC news today. Not because BBC news is particularly funny, on the contrary, since most of our news is dominated by youths getting stabbed up in London… innit blood?

No. The reason i was laughing is because Google are facing some issues with street mapping in the UK, yes thats right, the UK. The country which has the most CCTV cameras pointed at its citizens in the world!

Apparently Privacy International wrote to Google asking what measures can be taken to keep people anonymous.

“We’ve spoken to Google in the past about this and received a snide response telling us to look more closely at their blogs.

“We’ve been told by engineers at Google that the technology is not ready to be deployed.”

Now lets just look at some stats about CCTV Camera’s in the UK shall we?

  • The UK has 1% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras
  • Croydon has more CCTV cameras than New York
  • London’s Metropolitan Police Force have approximately 200,000 cameras installed around the capital
  • Almost every bank cash machine in the country uses CCTV to record you making your transaction – bet you can’t see the camera!
  • The UK has more CCTV cameras per head of population than ANY other country. About one camera for every 14 people
  • Harrods London store has in excess of 500 CCTV cameras installed
  • It is estimated that there are in excess of 4 million CCTV cameras in the UK, approximately 20% of the World’s total
  • In London you are likely to be caught on camera 300 times a day

So with all that to think about, is anyone really going to be bothered with the tiny percentage chance of being caught by a Google street view camera… i think not!

WordPress Image Upload HTTP Error

I have been enjoying using the latest version of WordPress but i am getting seriously pissed off with the fact that every time i try and upload an image i am presented with some red text that tells me “HTTP Error”.

As you can see that text is really not very helpful, so its hard to find out exactly what the issue with WordPress is. Now i have been searching the net for the answers and the most common answer is to insert this code into your .htaccess.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

However, if like me you tried this and it didn’t work, your problem might be something a lot more strange.

[JUMP TO SOLUTION WITHOUT READING MY FINDINGS]

I got onto my hosts because i thought it might be something a bit more serious on the web server, when George (the web host guy) tried to upload an image he managed to do it ok without any sort of problem, i thought it was a bit weird so asked what OS and browser he was using and it turns out it was XP and IE.

I finished off the chat and booted my MacBook into XP mode, opened up IE and sure enough i could upload an image into WordPress, how fucking weird? Well next i opened Firefox in XP and tried to do it… worked again.

So i booted back into OSX and tried it from Firefox… didn’t work, so i opened up Safari.. didn’t work, i even asked the Evil Green Donkey and some others in my office to try it from their Macs… didn’t work.

For what ever reason which i really can’t get my head around, it seems that this is an issue that is specifically with Flash on the mac, it doesn’t even seem browser related. And i have tried this on over 6 different installs of WordPress on multiple hosting accounts.


I reinstalled flash for the mac and tried every possible solution to this problem which are listed on the wordpress blog and on another site i found and still no joy. The ONLY way i can upload images to any of my blogs using OSX is to disable the flash image uploader by using the no-flash-uploader plugin, this reverts it back to the html version. To use, simply put that file into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and then activate it through the plugins section of your admin area.

Now i can have images again, but i do hope that someone finds the issue and fixes it, in the mean time enjoy a picture that proves that none of this is an issue with my hosting and that images work fine once the flash uploader has been disabled. Now all i need to do is install the above mentioned plugin on all of my sites :o(

As usual, please leave a comment if you have experienced this issue.

Firefox losing focus in text area?

Then the speed dial extension is to blame!

I don’t really want to write this because i love speed dial so much, but i have to admit that it is really starting to piss me off. Every single time i write something in a text area i lose focus.

It means that every time i am writing away, the cursor will disappear out of the text area and i am just sat there typing blankly. It seems that whenever speed dial does a refresh in the background this will happen.

The only way round it is to disable speed dial. I have contacted the developers so i hope this will be solved soon. I just wanted to post this in case anyone out there searching about the issue didn’t know how to solve it.

I lost focus 4 times whilst writing this, GRRRRR!

FitnessFirst.co.uk meet Domain Canocalization

I have decided to get off my slightly fat ass and start going to the gym, we have a fitness first which is situated right between my house and the tube station i use so there is no excuse for me not going to the gym since i will have to walk past it.

So whilst i was eating my nice healthy potato for lunch i decided to check out the fitness first website by typing in fitnessfirst.co.uk into Firefox 3’s awesomebar and hitting enter, to my surprise i got an error back saying the site could not be found. A quick edit of the URL to add www at the start then gave me access to the site.

As i stated in my other post about LondonElects not 301’ing their site, i cannot believe that a company the size of fitness first cant hirer a developer who realises this issue, i wonder how many visitors they are losing a month because people just type in the url and think the site is down.

Perhaps they will give me free membership for pointing it out? Yeah right.